Saturday, June 5, 2010

Google has said it is "close" to handing over German Wi-Fi Data..

TweetPin ItGoogle has said it is "close" to handing over German Wi-Fi Data..

Search giant Google has said it is "close" to resolving issues that have prevented it from passing a hard disk of data to German authorities. The disk contains wi-fi data Google Street View cars gathered by mistake.

Pressure to make the data available has been increased by the German regional Information Commissioner that started the inquiry.

In a statement, Dr Johannes Caspar said he expected Google to "continue on the path of co-operation and transparency".

Google had until the early hours of 27 May to hand over the data to Dr Caspar from the Hamburg Information Commissioner's office.

Dr Caspar had requested answers to a range of technical questions about how Google had managed to gather details of internet traffic from wi-fi networks belonging to individuals and businesses all over the world.

He had also asked to see the data that Google gathered.

Google answered many of the Information Commissioner's questions in time for the 27 May deadline and made a Street View car available for tests. However, it refused to hand over the hard disk of data, amid concerns that it may be breaching German telecommunication law by doing so.

But Dr Caspar told the BBC last week: "I have asked the General Prosecutor in Hamburg whether Google would face problems in giving us the material, and he told us that this would not be a problem."

Google said previously it had been trying to improve location-based services by collecting wi-fi data, but claimed that a "failure of communication between and within teams" led to the capture of data transmitted across unencrypted wireless networks.

Hidden networks

The statement from the Hamburg Information Commissioner's office indicated that it had performed tests on a Google Street View car, in a controlled environment, with simulated wireless networks.

"For the wi-fi coverage in the Street View cars, both the free software Kismet, and a Google-specific program were used.

"The Google-specific program components are available only in machine-readable binary code, which makes it impossible to analyse the internal processing," it said.